Sunday, February 7, 2016

Well that was fast…

One of the
most interesting aspects of Cold War intelligence history is whether the spies
recruited by the Western intelligence agencies (mainly CIA and MI6) were
supplying real information or whether they were double agents. In his recent
article ‘Doubles
Troubles: The CIA and Double Agents during the Cold War’, Benjamin B.
Fischer (former Chief Historian of the Central Intelligence Agency) makes the
case that in Cuba, East Germany and the USSR practically all the CIA agents
were in reality under the control of the enemy security services.

The author
says:

‘During the Cold War the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an
industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times. The result was a
massive but largely ignored intelligence failure. The facts are available from
official sources.’

‘The CIA touts Adolf Tolkachev as its
‘‘billion-dollar spy’’ during the 1980s, asserting that the Soviet electronics
researcher saved the Pentagon several times that amount in research and
development (R&D) and production costs with purloined information on Soviet
military radar and avionics. I believe, however, that Tolkachev was a double
agent, in fact the precursor to the dangles who came after his 1985 arrest………..Tolkachev was not the only double on the CIA’s
payroll. SE Division was handling another agent encrypted EASTBOUND, who also
was selling information on military radars. Soviet and East German sources have
confirmed that the anonymous agent was a double. I believe that Tolkachev and
EASTBOUND were fraternal twins.’

I don’t know why this organization was so interested in this
case or how they were able to follow up Fischer’s
article so quickly. Since they have such 'superior' investigative skills they
could also look into the compromise of Allied codes and ciphers in WWII. That’s
research that I’d like to see!